His throat constricting, Russ held Carly tightly.
When Carly opened the door to leave, she spied her car in the driveway and, through the windows, the boxes she had brought. She shot him a look that was mildly accusing. “We were so busy, we forgot about Mom’s quilt studio.”
“I guess we did. I’ll get around to it. Maybe you could leave the boxes.”
She did, and a few days later, she called to ask if he had sorted out the quilt studio yet. Sorted it out? Russ thought. He could not even open the door. “I haven’t had a chance,” he told her. “I’ve had a lot to do, catching up at work after the time off. You know.”
“Yes, Dad,” she said. “I know.”
The last time she had called him Dad was at her high school graduation.
When he returned home from work the next day, he found a tentative, apologetic message on the answering machine. Elaine had been participating in a round robin quilt project with some friends from the Internet, the caller explained. When a member received another member’s quilt block, she was supposed to add a border and mail it on to the next quilter in the circle. The person after Elaine had not received any packages in months, and three of the round robin quilts were missing. They had heard about the “recent tragedy,” and hated to bother him about something so trivial, but they wondered if perhaps the quilt tops could be located among Elaine’s belongings and sent on their way. The caller left an address.
Russ searched through the pile of unopened mail on the credenza in the foyer and found one large, padded envelope addressed to Elaine. Inside was a red, brown, green, and ivory quilt, partially completed, with a complicated star in the middle and two surrounding borders, one of squares, one of flowers and leaves. Russ tore open every envelope addressed to his dead wife, and although some contained fabric or quilt blocks, none but the first met the description the caller had left on the answering machine. He climbed the stairs, touched the door to her quilt studio, and let his hand fall to his side. Then he went to his bedroom and dialed the phone.
“Hello?”
It was Christine, not Charlie. That made it easier. “Christine.” He cleared his throat. “Christine, it’s Russ. I need your help.”
She arrived early the next morning, before he had eaten breakfast. That was his fault, not hers; he had sat at the table lost in thought without taking a bite for at least a half hour before her car pulled into the driveway. He scraped his clammy eggs and bacon into the trash and let her in.
Christine gave him one long, wordless hug, then held him at arm’s length and gave him a searching look. “You stopped shaving?”
His hand flew to his jaw. “Yeah. Well. Sometimes I forget.”
“You look like you’re growing a beard.” She smiled, wistful and sad. “It looks good on you.”
He mumbled a thank you and led her upstairs. Christine pushed open the door to the quilt studio without giving him a chance to prepare himself, as if ignoring his need to steel himself would make the need vanish. “Should we find the round robin quilts first?” she asked, standing in the center of the room. Her gaze fell upon the design wall and lingered there.
“Sure,” said Russ. He went to the stack of envelopes on the table beside Elaine’s sewing machine. They held letters full of condolences and well-wishes and assurances of the senders’ prayers. They turned Russ’s stomach and he threw them in the trash.
Christine soon found the round robin projects neatly folded on Elaine’s worktable. Russ set them aside to mail later and began assembling the collapsed cartons Carly had left. He opened the closet door, scooped up armfuls of folded fabric, and dropped them into an open carton. Christine did the same with the shelves of quilting books.
“What do you want to do with all this?” asked Christine when they had filled several cartons.
“Donate it. Give it away. Throw it away. I don’t care.”
He was conscious of Christine’s silence, but at that moment he truly did not care what became of his wife’s treasured accumulation of fabric and patterns. Now that he had finally broken through whatever had kept him from entering that room, he wanted to strip it bare of anything that reminded him of Elaine. She had called the quilt studio her haven, her sanctuary, but it had not saved her. She had not even been able to climb the stairs to reach it in the end.
He packed her sewing machine into a box and stuffed smaller pieces of fabric around it for protection. Sorting out her unfinished projects was harder, especially when he came upon the partially completed quilt with the log cabin blocks and the stars, the last quilt she had begun before her diagnosis. He recognized pieces from quilts he knew well—two for his nieces, one for Alex, one for their own bed—extra or imperfect blocks she had not been able to use but had been unwilling to discard. He found a stack of twenty small quilt blocks made up in old-fashioned looking material, each pattern different, from a class she had taken years before. Christine discovered a binder Elaine had kept of useful tips her Internet quilting friends had exchanged by email.
“Email,” said Russ, suddenly remembering. He switched on the computer and checked her account. She had more than fourteen hundred email messages waiting. The last was a warning from her ISP that her account was full.
“I can’t write back to all these people,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” said Christine. She sat down and began typing. He hesitated, but returned to his own work, and before long Christine announced that she had sent one message to everyone in Elaine’s address book letting them know that she had died. “There’s no good way to deliver this kind of bad news,” she said. “I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to anyone.”
“Most of them probably know already,” said Russ, sealing a carton with heavy tape. “I think someone posted a link to her obituary on a message board.”
The hours passed. They took a break for lunch; Russ made sandwiches and listened to Christine’s news about Charlie and the kids. Christine seemed to want to tell him something else, but hesitated on the brink of speaking. He was getting used to that. Everyone wanted to comfort him, to find the right words that would bring him solace. He knew there were no such words.
It was harder to return upstairs than he had expected. He had thought the shock of pain would wear off from the sheer physical effort of putting away a life. Instead he had to force himself through the doorway of the room. And suddenly he understood why: The cancer quilt gaped like an open wound from the design wall.
Angrily, he snatched the fabric pieces one by one and stuffed them into a plastic bag.
“Careful,” said Christine.
“Why?” He scraped the last pieces to the floor roughly. “What’s the point? What was the point of any of it?”
“Oh, Russ. You don’t mean that.”
But he did. He wished he could articulate his anger, his demand for some divine justification for what had happened. Elaine’s death was beyond unfair. God should not allow someone who had devoted her life to easing the suffering of others to die in pain. God should not have brought Russ and Elaine together just to shatter his heart by taking her away. All their dreams, all their plans, every word of tenderness, every gesture of affection, every kiss, every hope, every moment had been an empty promise, a tease, a waste.
Hollow and cold and helpless, he closed his eyes and let the bag of black and red and green fall to the floor.
Christine took it up. He watched as she gently picked up the remaining pieces of the quilt from the floor, brushed them off, and placed them carefully into the bag. She zipped the bag shut and put it in one of the last open boxes, where it quickly disappeared amid the abandoned quilting tools.
At last they finished. They packed up the last carton and sealed it, and as he straightened, Russ realized that he was exhausted, flooded with the kind of bone-aching weariness that usually followed a much more physically arduous day.
“What should we do with these?” asked Christine, gesturing to the cartons and boxes they had carried downstairs
and stacked in the foyer. He wondered if she knew it was a different question than the one she had asked before.
Christine had driven her minivan, so he said, “If I help you load, will you take them?”
“Take them where?”
“Goodwill. St. Vincent de Paul’s. Wherever.”
“But Russ …” Christine looked around, then gestured to the box containing Elaine’s sewing machine. “What about that? Don’t you want to save that, at least?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Mending? Maybe you should save it for Carly.”
“Carly already took what she wanted to keep. If you want it, take it.”
“I don’t want it. I just thought …” She shook her head. “Quilting was such an important part of Elaine’s life. I thought maybe you would want to keep something of that.”
“I don’t.” He hefted the largest box in his arms and carried it out to her minivan.
He woke shortly after two A.M., shaking and sick at heart. The covers were soaked in sweat. He pushed them aside and stumbled downstairs to the kitchen, where he poured a glass of water and tried to stop shaking. He ached for Elaine.
Back in bed, he struggled for sleep. At seven the alarm clock roused him from a restless doze. He showered and dressed for work, but his heart seemed to be pounding unnaturally hard, as if he had sprinted up four flights of stairs. In the hallway, he paused by Elaine’s quilt studio. The door was ajar; he pushed it open and took in the emptiness. Only the design wall remained, white flannel marked with a faint blue grid. A wave of grief swept over him and he pulled the door shut.
He needed to fill that space, he told himself as he drove to work. An exercise room. A home theater. Storage. All day he forced himself to consider alternatives rather than imagine the room without Elaine.
Two nights he wrestled with insomnia, fighting off memories of Elaine. On the third morning, he woke to the sounds of his own weeping. Ashamed, he snatched up the quilt and wrapped himself in it as he sat on the edge of the bed. He buried his face in the quilt and imagined he could still smell Elaine in it.
He picked up the phone and called Christine. The oldest boy answered; Russ asked for his mother with his teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. When she finally came to the phone, he said, “Where did you take them?”
“Russ?”
“Do you remember?” Three days had passed since Christine had driven off with the boxes. Elaine’s possessions were surely scattered by now; he had no hope of gathering them together again. “The cartons. Her quilting things. Where did you take them?”
“Russ—”
“I need to find her cancer quilt. You put it in a green and white carton that used to hold copier paper. Did you donate it or throw it out or—”
“Russ,” said Christine. “I have it.”
She had kept everything for him, every box, a safeguard against future regret. Later that day, Charlie returned them. He helped Russ carry the boxes upstairs but left quickly, mercifully, before Russ began unpacking.
He searched for the cancer quilt first just to assure himself that it had not disappeared. He pressed each jagged piece to the design wall exactly as Elaine had arranged them, exactly as they had been indelibly seared into his memory.
He set up the sewing machine, found the manual, and read it cover to cover. The machine was capable of producing more stitches than he had known existed. He doubted he would need them all. As far as he could recall, Elaine had used only the one that went in a straight line and the one that zigzagged.
It took him four tries to thread the machine properly, but once he did, he proceeded slowly and methodically through a few practice seams. Elaine had always whizzed through everything, hacking off pieces that were too large or steaming them with the iron and stretching them if they were too small. That was her way in many things. Had been her way.
He hesitated before taking pieces of the cancer quilt from the design wall. How Elaine would have marveled at the sight of him. She probably would have smothered a laugh before diplomatically coaching him through his first few clumsy stitches.
He sewed a green triangle to a red, added a black pentagon, then stuck the assembled pieces to the design wall and stepped back to take a look. It didn’t look like much. He took a few more pieces, sewed them together, and then a few more. He interrupted his work to set up the ironing board; he pressed all the sewn sections flat and discovered that they adhered to the design wall better. “What do you know,” he said aloud, rearranging a few pieces, then immediately shifting them back to Elaine’s original placement. It was her quilt, her last quilt. Nothing he did could improve upon it.
He sewed late into the night, and he worked on the quilt every weekend and every evening after work until the top was completed. Tentatively pleased, he stuck it to the design wall and studied it. The sight struck him like a punch in the gut. It was all sharp angles and angry colors; it was shattered glass and anguish. This is how Elaine had felt.
He had to leave the room.
When he returned to the quilt studio a few days later, he unpacked the boxes of books and returned them to the shelves. One title caught his attention: All About Quilting from A to Z. That sounded promising. He set it aside and referred to it later as he layered and basted the quilt top.
The book provided an entire section on machine quilting, but Elaine had never quilted any other way but by hand. Russ had often watched as she sat on the sofa beside him, quilt hoop on her lap, the rest of the quilt’s layers bundled around her. The book said machine quilting could be sturdier and faster, but he decided to stick with what was most familiar.
He found Elaine’s lap hoop in the largest of the cartons, put it around the center of the quilt, and tightened the screw until the three layers were secure and smooth. Carrying it downstairs so he could quilt during the Mariners game, he stepped on a corner of the quilt, tripped, and stumbled down several stairs before grabbing hold of the handrail. He swore softly, envisioning his skull cracked open upon the tile floor of the foyer. Untangling himself, he discovered that he had not torn the quilt, but had stepped on the hoop and broken one of the thin wooden circles.
The next day, he spent his lunch break at Elaine’s favorite quilt shop, wandering the aisles in search of replacement parts for quilt hoops. He found new hoops and more gadgets for machine quilting than he would have imagined necessary, but no replacement parts. Occasionally an employee or another shopper, invariably female, would smile indulgently at him in passing. No one offered to help, but he suspected that was not because he looked like he knew what he was doing.
His lunch hour half over, Russ went to a large island in the middle of the room where a shop employee was cutting fabric. She smiled at him as he approached, but she immediately returned her attention to her work.
“Excuse me,” said Russ. “I’m trying to find some replacement hoops.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The woman set down her rotary cutter. “I just assumed you were the husband of one of our customers.”
“No.” Not quite.
“I’d be happy to help you. What did your wife send you in to buy?”
Inwardly, Russ winced. “She didn’t send me. I broke the inner wooden circle of her quilting hoop and I was hoping to find a replacement.”
“Before she finds out?” said the woman, amused.
“No,” said Russ. “I need it to finish one of her quilts.”
“Finish one of …” The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Do you think that’s a good idea? Maybe you should ask her first. I know if my husband started poking needles into my quilt, I’d really let him have it.”
“If my husband did, I’d take away the scissors before he hurt himself,” remarked a passing customer.
“Can you point me in the right direction?” asked Russ patiently.
“We don’t sell replacement parts for quilting hoops,” said the woman. “In fact, I don’t know anyone who does. It probably wouldn’t be very cost effective.
You can buy a new hoop pretty cheap. Do you want me to show you where they are?”
“No, thanks. I remember.” Annoyed and embarrassed, Russ purchased a hoop similar to the one he had broken and left the shop as quickly as possible.
He quilted in the evenings in front of the television, as Elaine used to do. Something about the repetitive motions of quilting allowed his mind to disconnect from himself, to float on a stratum out of reach of his anger and the slow, steady ache of loneliness. In those moments he could remember Elaine without pain.
Working on the cancer quilt became a way to fill the empty hours between work and sleep. The quilt became a tribute to her, a link to her. Sometimes he felt as if she were watching over his shoulder, encouraging him to persevere, shrugging off his mistakes. At first his stitches were huge, crooked, and scattered, as if someone had spilled a bag of long grain rice on the quilt. As the weeks passed, they became smaller and more precise, falling into a distinguishable pattern of loops and scrolls.
He finished the quilt a few weeks shy of the first anniversary of Elaine’s death. Following the instructions in her books, he attached a hanging sleeve to the back of the quilt and hung it in the living room. It clashed with the rest of the furnishings, but he didn’t care. In fact, he respected the disruption. He figured that was part of the message of the quilt.
On the night that marked one full year without Elaine, Christine and Charlie came into the city to distract him with dinner at his favorite restaurant. They didn’t tell him that was the reason, of course, but he knew. When they came over to pick him up, they stopped short at the sight of the cancer quilt. Christine sucked in a breath; Charlie let out a low whistle.
“Interesting choice in … art, buddy,” said Charlie dubiously.
Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters Page 19